William Floyd (1734-1821) was a gentleman farmer from Brookhaven, Long Island, New York. He was a member of the Suffolk County Militia during the American Revolution, rising to major general. He represented New York in the First and Second Continental Congress (1774-1776), and signed the Declaration of Independence, after New York’s legislature permitted its delegates to switch its vote to affirm the irrevocable step on July 9, 1776. Floyd was elected to the First Congress as an anti-Federalist, and served from 1789 to 1791. He later served in the state senate.

Hannah More (1745-1833), educator, writer, and social reformer, was born in Stapleton, near Bristol, England. She became a teacher at her older sister’s boarding school in Bristol, and wrote pastoral plays such as The Search after Happiness. More moved to London, into an elite literary and political circle which included Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and William Wilberforce. She continued to write books, poems, and moralistic tracts such as Character of a Young Princess (1805), Christian Morals (1813), and Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809). Her Village Politics, by Will Chip (1792) was designed to counter the radical political and religious views of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution. More also helped establish schools for the poor.